


Godfathers

by LadyAmina



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, F/M, Fluff, Get together fic, M/M, Modern AU, Muggle AU, Pregnant Lily, baby preparation, lamaze class, pregnant Alice, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-14 02:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5725903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAmina/pseuds/LadyAmina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius is devoting himself whole-heartily to helping James and Lily prepare for the arrival of the baby.  He finds support for himself in the most unlikely of places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lamaze

The first things Sirius noticed when he entered Gymnasium 3 of the local wellness center, were the bouncy balls. Enormous, colorful, copious, bouncy balls. He put a hand on James’s shoulder to steady himself. “Prongs. Prongs, look at all of them.”

James rolled his eyes but Sirius could hear the smile when he explained. “They’re yoga balls and if you start chucking them at the walls or the people we’ll get thrown out of here, so  _ don’t. _ ”

Sirius gave a little huff but continued to look around. One of the four walls wasn’t really a wall, but a giant mirror, which made the small room look twice as big, with its bright lights and shiny wood floors. The wall opposite that one was solid but had great windows across the top which led onto the floor of the cardio center. Sirius could hear thrumming music and the whir of cycle machines and treadmills through them.

A tall woman in comfortable clothing approached them. She clearly wasn’t here for a workout. “James, good evening, how is everything going with you?” She asked, her smile was wide and kind.

“Everything is going along as it should, I think. Lily is visiting with her sister today, she just gave birth herself. So I’ve got my mate Sirius with me for extra ears, hope that’s alright.”

“Oh, that’s perfectly wonderful! Best wishes to your in-laws and their new niece or nephew, you’ve a very busy family just now, Mr. Potter! Sirius is welcome, of course,” The woman, who was clearly the instructor of this Lamaze class, turned to Sirius, “You can take a seat either on a stability ball or a chair, we’re not fussy here, are we, James?”

Sirius gave her one of his best smiles in return and immediately ran to get himself a ball.

The rest of the class filtered in - eight couples by the time class was meant to start - around them and gradually all of the people currently quite apparently carrying babies in their uteruses wound up on balls of various colors, while their partners scooted up close behind them in the available folding chairs. Sirius’s eyes were fixed on the instructor when he felt a hand come up around his middle to rest on his stomach. His eyes shot up to the mirror in front of him to see James trying to hold back from laughing while he leaned into Sirius’s ear, “Oh, Sirius, I’m so proud!” He patted Sirius’s stomach in the manner he usually reserved for the nine-months-pregnant-Lily.

Sirius snorted, probably too loudly, “Darling, you owe me a ring if we’re going to create life together. I’m very traditional  _ as you know _ . What would my family think?” He shuddered dramatically.

James shrugged and broke down laughing with his forehead on Sirius’s shoulder. “No worse than usual, probably.”

Sirius shoved his friend’s head lightly, only enough to ruffle his hair, really. “Rather they couldn’t possibly think any worse to begin with.”

“Yes, that,” James recovered himself and sat back a bit, though not all the way back on his chair.

“Alright,” the instructor brought her hands together. It would have been a clap, but it was far too slow and gentle to make any noise at all. “We’re only missing Alice and Frank, I suppose they’re running behind schedule. Shall we begin?” But she was interrupted by the arrival of a tiny woman with short spikes of blond hair and a tall, lanky man in a green sweater big enough to carpet the room (which was outrageous in the heat of late June) and khakis that did not quite come down to his ankles. In all fairness, the woman was probably of normal human size, but next to the height of her partner she seemed much like a pixie.

“Sorry!” Her face matched her apology, “Don’t mean to interrupt, I hope we haven’t missed much.”

“Of course not, Dear, we haven’t even started yet. Come in, come in. And my my my, Frank, how you’ve changed since last week!” The instructor said and the room tittered. Sirius was missing out on some joke.

“Frank had a call from the station, this is my friend, Remus, I’ve asked him to come instead. I thought it’d be alright, he’s the godfather after all.”

“Of course it’s alright, we have a whole host of visitors today,” Instructor-lady nodded at Sirius, who waved at them. “Just take seats, both of you, and we’ll get started.”

Alice grabbed both a ball and a chair for Remus, despite her enormous belly, and brought them over next to Sirius and James to set them up. Remus looked at a loss for what to do with himself, but took his seat as he was clearly meant to.

Sirius heard James lean over to murmur at Alice conspiratorially. “You know the partner’s not a necessity, right? You could just as well have come alone.” This had to be true, Sirius could spot two partner-less women in the group.

He watched Alice’s face in the mirror. It was suddenly grim and she was shaking her head “Absolutely not. When Frankie took the call his mum offered to come with me instead. I’m just lucky Remus was available to grab and virtually throw in front of her instead. Narrow escape. And what about you?” She waved her fingers at Sirius. Her nose scrunched when she smiled, which didn’t make her look any less like some sort of woodland creature.

“This here’s basically my second wife anyway. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for him to hitch along to these things as is.” Sirius swatted at him, but James dodged it handily.

“How dare you? I, too, am a godfather and  _ obviously _ this is the place to be for godfathers.” Sirius tilted his head back to wink at Remus, whose eyebrows raised visibly. And whose cheeks flushed pleasantly. And whose mousy curls were falling into his green eyes.

Sirius sat up straight on his ball before he went into full cardiac arrest over a cute boy. Like he was fourteen all over again.

Anyway, instructor-lady was talking again. “Shall we try this again? Excellent. Good evening, everyone, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Miriam, you can call me that, or Ms Miriam, or Ms Strout, whatever you’re most comfortable with. Welcome to Wednesday Night Lamaze! Tonight I’d like to discuss what our carriers should expect postpartum. I’d like to start with a small video and we’ll have a bit of a discussion about that and go from there, sound good?” She waited for the scattered head nods before she gave two thumbs up and walked over to the small flat screen television in the corner of the room.

While she busied herself, Sirius heard the skid of a folding chair on the wood, and thought that James was trying to seat himself next to Sirius like when they were supposed to be watching educational films in school and would instead put their heads together to make plans for later bits of mischief with Peter. Instead he looked over to see Remus’s long legs stretched out in front of him, seated between Alice and Sirius himself.

Instead of leaning over to his friend, Remus whispered in Sirius’s ear. “They should have one of these things specifically for godparents, really.”

Sirius nearly leapt out of his seat. Remus’s unexpected breath on his ear was enough to make his entire face hot as coals. Lucky Miriam had turned the lights down. In all practicality, Remus had probably just spoken very low, but it felt like a whisper; intimate and secret. Good lord, Sirius hoped he wouldn’t have to re-experience puberty along with all of these cute-boy feelings.

“Only if we all get to sit on these bouncy-balls.” Sirius gave a little hop to demonstrate the necessary bounciness in question.

Remus huffed a small breath - a laugh. Sirius definitely wanted to make him do that again.

“But really, a sort of support group for those lying just outside the chaos of childbirth. We get all the drama and none of the credit, don’t we?” Remus continued.

Sirius spun around finally to meet his eyes. The video had started unbeknown to the two of them. “You may be onto something there. I  _ am  _ getting all of the drama. And you heard how he referred to me. His ‘second wife’. Like I’m not even a part of this. I sure as hell am a part of this!” He hissed, quiet as he could. James scoffed behind him but didn’t interrupt.

“It’s like he wouldn’t even have asked you if the mother had been able to attend,” Remus said, face straight as a pin.

“You know I think you’re right about that,” Sirius agreed. He was about to add to it when Remus reached over with a gangly arm and tucked something into Sirius’s hand. The tips of his fingers were cold where they struck Sirius’s palm.

Sirius looked down at it.

“Call me if you want to start this support group, then.” And his chair moved back to its original place behind Alice.

With some difficulty, Sirius tore his eyes away from the hastily scrawled phone number on the little crumpled gum wrapper and he shoved it into his pocket.

 


	2. Out for a Drink

Sirius waited a full week before he let himself touch the crumpled gum wrapper. He considered it every night in between, but every night he waged war on himself and the following Wednesday night, he lost. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to seem desperate or over-eager. As far as Sirius was concerned, those were personality traits that couldn’t be helped. But what if this Remus fellow was just being polite and Sirius had just misjudged the entire situation? It was something he’d been known to do, on occasion. And every hour he waited, the more likely of a possibility that seemed to be.

On Wednesday, however, he discovered that he didn’t really care.

Remus answered on the second ring. “You’ve reached the mobile of Remus Lupin, if you’re calling for Mrs. Fig’s Animal Care you’re one number off, just redial and end with a ‘1’ not a ‘7’.”

Sirius was taken aback. It was him, it didn’t sound pre-recorded. “Is that how you answer the phone? For real? In real life?” Well, he meant to say ‘hello’, but that didn’t pan out.

“Oh, you’re not calling for the animal shelter, are you?”

“Well, I wasn’t before, but I might be now. A ‘1’ you say? I’m jotting that down. It’s Sirius, from the Lamaze class last week.”

Remus was laughing on the other end, “Hello then, Sirius. Don’t meet many Sirius-es, you probably could have just left it at that.”

“Well you could have forgotten me altogether, so I had to be sure,” Sirius defended.

“Unlikely,” He smiled against his will, glad that they weren’t on a video-chat of any kind. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten me, though.”

How was Sirius supposed to reassure this man that  _ no he had most certainly not forgotten about him _ without scaring him off? “I most certainly did not forget about you,” there was a breathy noise like the quiet laugh Remus had given him the previous week. “I was just trying to figure out the logistics of this godfathers’ Lamaze class we’re planning.”

“And what have you come up with?” In Sirius’s mind, Remus’s face was doing that light pink thing he’d witnessed last time. He didn’t have a whole lot to work with, but he did have enough to be entirely distracted by.

“Well, I think we should start with a meeting of the founding members, say for coffee? Sometime soon?” Sirius ran his fingers through his hair in nerves while he waited for a response, then silently chastised him for taking on James’s bad habit.

Good lord, he was taking way too long to answer. Sirius’s mind ran through a whole host of things Remus might have been doing during this silence. Everything from glaring at his mobile in disgust to chewing on his bottom lip in consideration. Was Remus a lip-biter? He seemed like a lip biter. He could picture Remus’s lips pretty clearly, he thought.  _ Focus _ , he commanded himself.

“I’m free tomorrow afternoon, I think.”

Sirius quite literally sagged with relief - right onto the nearby sofa. His body sprawled over the cushions like drapery. “Brilliant. Uh- I’ve only just realized I don’t actually know where you live. I’m only a few minutes walk from the wellness center, so somewhere around there works for me if it does for you.”

“I’m a bit further than that, but not by much. We could meet at that little place, The Bean, over there. Sound alright? About half past twelve?”

Sirius didn’t bother pausing to pretend to check his schedule. “Seems perfect. I have your number if anything comes up, and now you have mine, yeah?”

“That I do. So I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow.”

 

***

 

Sirius arrived at The Bean a bit ahead of schedule. He knew this. He knew he was early. And yet immediately he started panicking that Remus wasn’t going to show.

He tried to shake the feeling and chose selected one of the high-topped tables in the center of the room. He threw his bag over the back of a chair and climbed up into it. He took out a report that needed filling for work to attempt to distract himself, but the words just weren’t making it from his eyes to his brain.

He tried valiantly for several minutes before checking the time on his phone. 12:32. That wasn’t so bad. Maybe Remus just couldn’t find parking or something.

At 12:41, Sirius allowed himself to start getting worried.

By 12:55, Sirius thought that not only was Remus Lupin not coming, but he  _ hated _ Sirius. Hated everything about him.

His mobile vibrated at 12:58. Sirius lunged for it, even though it was right in front of him.

 

[12:58] Going alright?

 

It was James. Sirius’s heart sank and a lump formed in his throat.

 

[12:59] Nah. Think I’ve been stood up

 

He typed the message to James and shoved the phone into his bag where it couldn’t taunt him anymore. He tucked the boring, nonsensical reports into their folder and was fully prepared to leave when he spotted a bulky form facing the same way as he, across the cafe. While he didn’t presume to know Remus well enough to judge his appearance based on the curls on the back of his head, he couldn’t think of anyone else who might be mad enough to wear a jumper at this time of year. Sirius nearly forgot to grab his bag off of his chair in his relief to see him.

“How long have you been here?” He asked upon approach. He hadn’t meant to startle Remus, but clearly he had, as the other man jumped and smacked his knee on the underside of the table. He winced while he tried to smile a greeting at Sirius.

“Oh hey, I thought again that maybe you’d forgotten. Or that I got here too late and you’d already left. Been here for about fifteen minutes, now.” Remus motioned for Sirius to sit across from him, but Sirius stayed where he was - standing beside the table with his bag slung over his shoulder and his hand on his side.

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Sirius wasn’t mad at Remus for being late. He wasn’t even upset with him for not calling or texting. In all honesty, he wasn’t really sure why his voice was coming out harder than he intended, with an edge of frost he didn’t think he felt.

Remus frowned up at him. “I’m really sorry. I left my mobile at home. I never remember to take it anywhere, I’m sorry. Were you waiting long?”

“Give me your hand.”

“My what?”

“Your hand, Remus, give me your hand.” Remus held his right hand up cautiously to Sirius, who took it and the pen he had clipped to the reports folder. Across the tough skin of Remus’s palm, he wrote his phone number. “Next time, use someone else’s phone.”

Remus’s eyes were raised and he stared down at his hand. “I will. Thank you. Will you sit?” He managed, hardly looking up from the center of his hand. He hurriedly made a fist and stuffed both of his hands into his lap.

Sirius heaved himself into a chair across from Remus and set his bag on the one next to him.

“Can we start over?” Remus asked, “I really don’t want to have fucked this up already.”

Sirius didn’t realize how tense he’d been until he let his body relax a bit. “You haven’t messed anything up,” He assured him.

“Good. Because all humor aside, I’m going insane with Alice and Frank. I have no one else to talk to, they’re my best friends and I love them, but I’m going mental. And I can’t possibly tell them that because what exactly do I have to complain about? I’m not having a kid, they are. It’s more than a little frustrating.”

Oh.

_ Oh _ .

Remus actually wanted to discuss godfatherly duties. Sirius  _ had _ misjudged the situation. There was no flirtation in Remus’s eyes, only mild panic. This was not a date. This was a godfathers’ support group. He ran his fingers through his hair again.

“I’m in much the same boat. I mean, I have Pete, I talk to him when I need some baby-free time, but James and Lily are… I basically live with them,” He admitted, “I mean, I have my own place, but I’m at theirs much more often and I’m really enjoying all the prep work for the arrival, but I know what you mean. There’s not a lot of room for  _ your _ own concerns in it all, now that I think about it.”

“You mean you hadn’t noticed?” Remus seemed dumbfounded.

Sirius gave a little shrug. “I’m not great at sorting my own concerns to begin with, really.”

They were quiet for a moment, but it wasn’t a terrible, heavy silence.

“I’m going to get a tea, what can I get you?” Remus asked.

“Oh, I’ll-”

“No, of course not. I didn’t call to tell you I’d be late, the least I can do is buy you a drink.”

Remus took his coffee order and went to go stand in line while Sirius waited at their table. He took his phone back out to see several concerned text messages from James. He’d have to explain the whole thing later.

He turned to watch Remus waiting instead. The other man held himself a little strangely. He held his limbs too close to his body and kept pulling his sweater around himself even though there was no possible way it could be riding up. Sirius doubted very much that he was aware that he was doing it, but he seemed to be trying to make himself small. As someone who spent most of his time doing things to make himself feel taller, louder,  _ more _ , Sirius found this an odd thing to do. He made sure to stop gawking before Remus turned around to bring their beverages to the table.

“So do your friends know what they’re expecting?” Sirius asked as he set them on the table.

“A baby, probably,” Remus quipped, adding far too much sugar to his tea.

Sirius tried to repress his smirk. “You know, everybody says they’ll ‘be happy no matter the gender’, but nobody ever says whether they’ll be happy if it’s not a baby.”

“Probably be too shocked to feel much of any emotion. I mean, you do these things and you pretty much expect that it’s going to be-”

“Correction,” Sirius interrupted him, “ _ I  _ do not do these things. Procreation is for squares.”

“People, then. Your friends and Alice and Frank,  _ they _ do these things and they pretty much expect that it’s going to be baby. Just try to imagine the shock if it turned out not to be.” How was he keeping such a straight face through this? Sirius’s eyes were watering.

“Has anyone ever told you you have a dry sense of humor?”

“No.”

Sirius looked at him suspiciously until Remus cracked a smile.

“The sex is male,” He said and it took Sirius a moment of mental chaos to realize that he was talking about Alice’s baby.

“Oh! Congratulations to them.”

Remus snorted. “Sure.”

“I don’t mean that- I didn’t- If you’d said anything else I wouldn’t have said ‘oh well, rotten luck,” Sirius couldn’t believe he even had to say this out loud.

Remus’s eyebrows were raised.

“What?” Sirius asked a little defensively.

He shook his head and looked down at his tea.  “I just hate that question.  I know you don’t mean it offensively.  But parents are all supposed to say ‘oh, we’ll be happy no matter what’, right?  But here’s the thing, everyone is looking forward to  _ something _ , whether it’s buying their kid dolls or watching them play football, everyone has a mental image of something they want from this kid.  And it’s pressure no matter what, whether you say it out loud or not - or even whether or not you address it to yourself.  And then if it’s  _ not the thing you were looking forward to,  _ there’s this invented resentment, like you suddenly  _ can’t  _ have those things because of the shape your kid was born.  No, sorry.  The answer isn’t ‘we’ll be happy no matter what’ the answer is ‘we’re raising them the same regardless, so it really doesn’t matter’.  

“And that’s not even getting into what happens so many years later when the kid starts discovering that their sex and their gender aren’t necessarily related.  Remember you said you’d be happy ‘no matter what’?  where the fuck does that mentality go over the years?  Putting importance on the biological sex of an baby puts all the pressure of society on it before it’s even born.  How the fuck is that fair?”  

Sirius knew his mouth was open but he didn’t close it.  

“Sorry, like I said, I know you didn’t mean it that way, it’s just a pet peeve of mine and I’ve been biting my tongue about it around Frank and Alice this whole time because they have every right to be excited about their possibly-baby-boy without me shitting on it.”

Sirius didn’t acknowledge the absurd apology, and instead added, “Not to mention it promotes the illusion of a binary, because there’s no checkbox for intersex on a birth certificate.”   Remus looked at him like he’d just offered him a lifetime supply of free candy but said nothing more on the subject.

The quiet dragged. It wasn’t terribly awkward or uncomfortable, but as a general rule Sirius hated drawn out silence. “How did yours ask you, then?”

Remus smiled at his cardboard cup. “Oh, that. It was nice- I don’t like going out much and they know that, but they convinced me to go out to dinner with them that night. It was all weird and formal and I was terrified that Frank was going to try to set me up with another work buddy, but thankfully it wasn’t that. They announced the pregnancy and they asked me to be godfather. The waiter hadn’t even brought us water yet. They’d intended to wait for dessert but they got excited and blurted it out as soon as we were seated. What about you, how did they ask?”

Sirius played with his cup of coffee on the table. “They didn’t, really. I was there when they found out, just sitting in the other room and James started screaming. We all just started referring to me as the godfather somewhere along the way. They asked Marlene to be godmother all nicely though. Sent her a formal little card in the mail. I picked the font for it.”

“Bet it was great font,” Remus snickered.

“It was, I have no idea what it was called, but it was adorable,” He confirmed. “You don’t like going out, though?”

Remus’s smile faltered. “Oh,” He hugged his arms closer to him, making himself smaller again. “No, not really. I’m more of a stay-at-home-and-eat-ice-cream-alone-in-my-living-room kind of person.”

Sirius hummed appreciatively. “That does sound nice. So next time we do this I’ll bring the ice cream then?”

Remus looked up finally. “Presumptuous, no? Assuming there’ll be a next time  _ and _ inviting yourself to my place?”

He probably should have made an attempt at humility, but Sirius shrugged instead. “I don’t think it’s so unreasonable.”

“No, I don’t think it is. I prefer chocolate. If you bring plain vanilla ice cream into my flat you will be immediately ejected from the premises,” Remus warned.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Sirius was impressed with the afternoon not just because it was blissfully easy to talk to this near stranger, but because when they weren’t talking they weren’t necessarily looking for something to talk about. Sirius’s need to fill silence diminished as the hour wore on until he was content to sit and sip the last of his now lukewarm coffee and help Remus make crude little folded structures out of paper straw wrappers.

“So next time, then,” Remus asked, carefully placing a roof on their straw-wrapper hut, “Would you say next time will be soon?”

Sirius nodded, “Yes. Definitely. Sooner than this time if I can talk you into it.”

Remus reached for another straw wrapper and his long fingers brushed Sirius’s. “I’m free for ice cream and a movie on Saturday?”

“Perfect. What movie?”

Remus’s lips quirked at the corners. “Leave that to me, you bring the ice cream. Can I see your phone?” Sirius handed his mobile over, curious, and watched Remus find the camera app and snap a picture of their straw paper village before crushing it with his sweater clad arm. “Send that to me, will you?”

Sirius was still alarmed from the destruction, but did as he was asked.

They stood simultaneously to clear the debris from the table and leave.

He didn’t realize it until they were already a block away from The Bean, but Remus was walking him home, still chatting. Sirius doubted very much that this was Remus’s normal route home as they cut down a side street a bit past the wellness center where they’d met and its attached hospital.

This was confirmed when they finally reached Sirius’s flat and Remus stopped with him.

“Thanks for not giving up and walking out on me earlier,” He said, Sirius’s reluctant fingers on the handle of the door.

“I’m glad I saw you before I did, I was just about to,” Sirius confessed. Remus was standing very close. Close enough to smell him. He couldn’t identify it- he didn’t think it was a specific scent, it was just  _ him _ and it was possibly the most pleasant thing he’d ever smelled.

“I’ll text you my address,” He smiled, one corner pulling up higher than the other, a bit of bottom lip tucked between his teeth. Sirius took a deep breath to steady himself.  _ That’s not what this is _ he reminded himself even as he imagined standing on the tips of his toes to reach those lips with his.  _ You will not ruin this for yourself like you ruin everything; you will  _ not.

Before he could pull himself out of this notion, Remus was spinning to walk back the way they’d come. Legs too long in front of him, elbows tucked against himself under his ridiculous giant jumper.

Sirius watched him go for too long before retreating into his building.


End file.
